Death penalty for convicted murderer

WEST CHESTER — The Coatesville man who fatally shot a city teenager and dismembered his body with a pair of chain saws, attempting to cover the crime up with the remains of a chopped-up pit bull, was sentenced to death Wednesday by a Common Pleas Court jury.

The seven men and five women who had heard the case against Laquanta Chapman deliberated for about three hours before returning an unanimous verdict to impose the ultimate capital penalty against the man they had less than a week earlier found guilty of the first-degree murder of 16-year-old Aaron Turner.

It is the first death penalty verdict that has been returned by a Chester County jury in almost two decades.

The sentence, which came after two days of testimony and argument in the trial’s penalty phase, was met by exclamations of subdued joy from the victim’s family, many of whom had attended every day of the three-week-long proceedings. “Thank you, Jesus,” some exclaimed before exiting the courtroom.

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Chapman, who has been in custody since his arrest four years ago today, was taken from the courtroom by sheriff’s deputies in handcuffs. He will be formally sentenced at a later date.

The jury had been asked to determine whether Chapman’s past criminal record of violent felonies and the impact his killing of Turner had on his victim’s family would be more deserving of the death penalty, or whether his life as an abused and abandoned child lessened the prosecution’s demand to put him to death.

By a 12-0 vote, the panel sided with the prosecution.

“I have sought the death penalty in the past very sparingly,” said Chief Deputy District Attorney Patrick Carmody, who led the prosecution along with Assistant District Attorney Michelle Frei, after the jury announced its decision. “But this case deserved it.”

According to the prosecution’s case, Chapman, a city drug dealer, lured Turner to his house on South Chester Avenue in Coatesville on the afternoon of Oct. 30, 2008, as the teen known as “Head” walked to an appointment at a community service program he was enrolled in. Chapman was reportedly angered because of drug debt he felt the youth owed him.

Inside the house, waving a gun, Chapman forced the Coatesville Area Senior High School student to walk to the home’s basement, strip off his clothes, and lie naked on the basement floor. He then shot the youth twice, killing him. Another man also fired shots into the teenager’s body. That man, identified afterward as Michael Purnell of Coatesville, has yet to be been charged,

Five days later, Chapman and others used two chain saws to dismember the youth’s body. After disposing of Turner in a group of garbage bags, Chapman attempted to cover up the crime by killing a pit bull and cutting up its body with the same chain saw.

Turner’s body has never been found,

On Wednesday, in their closing statements to the jury, given as the sun was setting in the sky outside the Chester County Justice Center, attorneys for both sides quoted from literature in their attempts to sway the jury to their side of the case — the death penalty for Carmody and life in prison without parole for Farrell, the court-appointed penalty phase counsel

Carmody, presenting his case first, offered the words of John Greenleaf Whittier, intoning: “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”

“What might have been for Aaron Turner, we will never know,” Carmody told the jury, mentioning Turner’s aspirations to attend Penn State and learn to be an auto mechanic. Evidence showed that Turner was wearing a Penn State jersey when Chapman forced him to strip to make it easier to cut his body apart with a chain saw.

“That jersey was a dream for Aaron, a path out of Coatesville. But when that jersey was ripped from him, his hope was taken by this defendant,” Carmody told the jury. “We will never know what might have been, because of Laquanta Chapman.”

But on Chapman’s behalf, Farrell reminded the panel of the words of Shakespeare in describing the quality of mercy, which he urged them to show his client. “It is an attribute to God himself; and earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice,” he recited from the play “The Merchant of Venice,” saying he had learned the speech in high school.

“Death is the most serious penalty known to law,” Farrell said to the jurors. “You decision is inescapably godlike. This is your turn to govern.”

He asked them to reject the death penalty and decide on “the moral, reasoned, response” of a life sentence. “There is only one way to deal with evil, one way to deal with hate, and that is with move, with mercy,” Farrell said.

As instructed by Judge William H. Mahon, who presided over the three-week-long trial, the jurors were asked to determine whether the prosecution had proven that there was an aggravating circumstances in its case against Chapman — that he had a significant history of violent felonies, namely two convictions in New Jersey for pointing a gun at another person.

If they unanimously agreed on that count, they would then consider the numerous mitigating factors presented by Farrell — that he was born to a drug-addicted mother, that he was physically abused by his father, that he was abandoned and neglected as a youth, that he suffered from mental health symptoms prior to the crime, and that he functioned well in a prison setting and posed no additional threat.

The jury would then weigh the mitigating factors against the aggravating factors. If a single juror decided that the mitigating factors outweighed the aggravating factors, the sentence would be life. If it unanimously found that the prosecution’s argument outweighed that of the defense, the sentence should be death. The panel chose the latter.

Chapman, 33, of Coatesville, was arrested four years ago today, on Nov. 15, 2008, when police raided his city home ostensibly to look for drugs and weapons, both of which they found in abundance. Chapman was armed with two pistols, and was wearing a bulletproof vest.

Inside the house, police also found bloody clothes, the body parts of a dismembered dog, and items that had been used to clean up blood. In the basement, they found evidence of human body tissue on the walls and on a support pole, and in the blades of two chains saws there.

According to the prosecution’s version of events described at trial and in Carmody’s closing argument on Wednesday, Chapman had become angry with Turner because of a dispute over drug sales and had laid out a plan to kill him.

“He’s loading up for bear,” Carmody said of the weapons, saws and cleaning products found in the house on South Chester Avenue during the police raid. “He’s preparing to kill Aaron. This crime is all set up.”

Bryan Byrd, Chapman’s cousin and the prosecution’s star eyewitness, said that Chapman and another man, Michael Purnell, forced Turner down into the basement of the house at gunpoint, and then Chapman asked Byrd to go back upstairs and turn up music that as playing as loud as possible. When Byrd returned, Chapman had ordered Turner to remove his clothes and lie naked on the basement floor. He shot him twice.

Five days later, Byrd said, Chapman had him help cut up Turner’s body with two chain saws that he had kept in the basement. The dismembered body was placed in industrial-size trash bags and disposed of a week later in the trash collection. The body has not been recovered.

In asking the jury to consider the character of the murder in weighing the factors for a death sentence, Carmody pointed to Chapman’s alleged taunting of Turner before firing the fatal shots into his prone body, asking him not to lie to him.

“He didn’t care what the answer was,” Carmody said of Chapman. “The question was made to give Aaron false hope. The tears that were going down Aaron’s face that day did not matter to Laquanta Chapman.”

The evidence that Farrell had presented this week about Chapman’s tormented upbringing, Carmody said, was “all about excuses,” noting that Turner had lost his father at a young age, as had Chapman, but that he did not turn to violence.

But Farrell jumped on the word “excuses” to rebut Carmody’s argument, saying that his client would not escape punishment at the end of the day, but rather would either face death or spend the rest of his life in prison.

“I am not asking for an excuse,” he said. “I am asking for mercy and leniency.”

Farrell pounded home again and again that the obstacles and burdens that his client faced from the time he was born in the hellish housing project in Newark, N.J., known as “Brick City,” later to have his ribs broken as a toddler by his father, who was sent to prison for the crime, changed his character.

Those factors became “a secret force that impels him, that changes his brain architecture,” Farrell said, quoting his psychological expert.” Those “adverse childhood experiences” caused “toxic stress” that led to a damaged maturity and led him to the horrible crime he committed.